The Japanese brought a man named Peterson from Hong Kong to organise ‘Australia Calling’. According to Georgina Fuller in her postwar interview, Peterson had stolen the identity papers of an Australian seaman and his true identity was unknown. Soon afterwards, Wynette McDonald started calling herself ‘Mrs Peterson’.
Understandably, the collaborators used pseudonyms, with the exception of Alan Raymond who made no attempt to hide his identity: after a lifetime of rejection and failure, people were listening to his views for the first time and he was enjoying the notoriety. John Holland, who started broadcasting from the German station XGRS in the Kaiser Wilhelm School on Great Western Road on 13 February, sometimes called himself ‘David Lester’. According to an anonymous informant in Holland’s file in the Australian National Archives, ‘He took over the Walla Walla[1] broadcast news from “Pat Kelly” (Frankie Johnston, Shanghai-born Irishman, Free State passport) when that worthy disgraced himself by a shady deal on classical records.’ For that misdemeanour, Johnston had served 14 days in the Bridge House, a former apartment block in North Szechuen Road in Hongkew, which the Kempeitai had turned into Shanghai’s chamber of horrors.
Holland said in a postwar statement, ‘I was asked to read a commentary written especially for the Australian audience urging Australians to refrain from any further participation in the Pacific War.’ The Germans were impressed with his delivery and diction and quickly increased his pay and gave him more responsibility.
As ‘Australia Calling’ took to the air to the imitation call of a kookaburra, 78,000 American and Filipino troops were being driven at bayonet point into captivity on the notorious Bataan Death March. Raymond made no mention of that in any of his broadcasts, or of the sook ching massacres of thousands of Chinese men and boys following the fall of Singapore, or of the Parit Sulong atrocity in Malaya in which 133 Allied prisoners, including many Australians, were machine-gunned, bayoneted, drenched with petrol and set alight.
Australian listening posts monitored Raymond’s broadcasts and the director-general of security labelled him the ‘Australian Lord Haw-Haw’ after the Nazi propagandist on German radio.34 Raymond’s readiness to join the Japanese war effort and the ease with which he slotted into its propaganda machine suggest he was already a Japanese agent when he returned to Shanghai in August 1940.
Meanwhile, Wynette McDonald worked as assistant to Berthel Alexander MacKenzie, who made anti-British broadcasts to Australia under the pseudonym ‘Roy Stewart’. He read letters from Shanghai residents to friends and relatives in Australia and warned of the dire consequences of resisting the Japanese. Some of Shanghai’s 200 Australian residents allowed their names to be used simply as a means of letting their families know they were alive but most recognised it as a propaganda trick and refused to take part.
The Japanese magazine Freedom of 10 June 1942 reported that ‘Roy Stuart [sic]’, who was connected with the ‘Break away from Britain League’, was an Australian ‘whose voice was well known over the Australian Radio 3AW’. The magazine added that the aim of the league and its leader Alan Raymond was to see ‘an Australia free from British influence and living at peace in co-operation with Japan’s projected East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere’.
Berthel MacKenzie claimed to have been born in Melbourne and to have attended Scotch College and the University of Melbourne but H. S. Austin, an Australian security officer who had worked with the Shanghai police, described him as ‘a renegade Britisher, a Scotsman who obtained his discharge from a Scottish regiment while stationed in Shanghai’. He also noted that MacKenzie was ‘opposed to Imperialism and bore a bitter hatred for the Royal Family’.35
In April the Japanese rewarded Wynette McDonald’s treachery with her own radio slot, ‘Woman’s Hour’, on XMHA over the long-wave transmitter. According to A. V. Cattel, the station’s chief engineer, her contribution ‘consisted mainly of persuading local women of the advantages to everyone of being under Japanese control’.36
Expatriate women in Shanghai, such as Georgina Fuller, thought that although the program was meant to be serious, it was regarded as a joke and they tuned in for a laugh. Some of McDonald’s claims, however, were highly defamatory. In one broadcast, she described John Curtin as ‘an evil and corrupting influence’ and accused him of poisoning the former prime minister Joe Lyons who had died of natural causes in February 1939.37 According to Georgina Fuller, ‘a close relationship sprang up between McDonald and Suyana, Chief of Police in Shanghai, and Hayashi, who subsequently became camp commandant of the internment area’.
In the Philippines, Donald and Ansie Lee were interned with 400 other anti-Axis foreigners in the camp at Sulphur Springs. Several internees recognised Donald and greeted him as a celebrity but he asked them to keep his identity a secret and they agreed. The commandant, a decent old German named Dahlan who had fought against the British in World War I, registered him as ‘William Donald of Edinburgh’, rather than ‘W. H. Donald of Chungking’. He also stored Donald’s papers and diaries in a locked shed and looked after them until the end of the war.
One of those who kept the secret was 13-year-old Roy Fernandez Jr. ‘There were no Japanese guards at Sulphur Springs, so we had a grown-up and a boy on the gate to see who was coming into the camp,’ he said. ‘I was there one day with Mr Donald. He was a nice person with short-cropped hair and a pleasant manner. He saw I was reading a book on India and asked me about it. We were quite close for the next six weeks and he gave me some guidance on what sort of books to read. Then we were sent to Santo Tomas.’
Donald was in a group of internees who were moved to the huge internment camp at Santo Tomas University in Manila. There, things became more difficult – it was always possible he would bump into a Japanese officer who had served in the China theatre and who knew him by sight.
The prospect of becoming gauleiter of the Australian media following a Japanese victory over Australia appealed enormously to Alan Raymond. He followed up his broadcasts with a vitriolic article entitled ‘Australians play with fire’ in the ‘Double Seventh Anniversary’ issue of the Shanghai Evening Post commemorating ‘the very unhappy day [7 July 1937] on which that sad series of events began which is called the China Incident’. The cover of the edition showed a chilling, four-colour drawing of a fully armed Japanese soldier standing on a map of Asia with the words ‘Guardian of East Asia’s Co-prosperity Sphere’.
‘The bogey of the Japanese was a thing which the British continually waved ominously before our eyes,’ Raymond wrote with unconscious humour. ‘We were constantly told that if the British did not protect us, the Japanese would get us.’ Describing Australia as a ‘British lacky [sic]’, he urged Australians to forge an independent path – as members of Japan’s Co-prosperity Sphere.38
Raymond kept up his anti-British barrage in a series of columns called ‘An Aussie’s Point of View’ in the Japanese-controlled Shanghai Times. But Japan’s hour had already passed. The shattering defeat of the Imperial Fleet in the Battle of Midway in June 1942 had destroyed any chance she might have had of making the Co-prosperity Sphere a permanent fixture in Asian life.
[1] Named after a small town in southern New South Wales
Ever since 8 December 1941 the Kempeitai had been picking up certain British and American nationals and taking them to their interrogation centre at Bridge House. They included Bill Gande, a wine importer, Eddy Elias, a stockbroker, A. H. Gordon, a photographer, and other seemingly ordinary people who were accused of ‘espionage designed to undermine the Japanese Empire’.
‘Victims were taken from all walks of life, without rhyme or reason,’ Hugh Collar wrote. ‘When they eventually came out, they were changed and badly shaken men. None of them talked and with cause.’1
Each man, however, had been reported at some point in the past as being a member of a security organisation, or for being ‘anti-Japanese’ and marked down for interrogation.
The most prominent American among this group was John B. Powell, whose anti-Japanese views were well known through his writings in China Monthly Review.
On 20 December half a dozen members of the Kempeitai raided his room at the Metropole Hotel on Foochow Road and seized papers and letters. He was driven to Bridge House and, after being stripped of his possessions, taken downstairs to the building’s former retail section, which had been converted into 15 prison cells of varying size.2
Powell was thrown into cell no. 5, a filthy room crowded with European and Asian prisoners. For the next 68 days, he was interrogated in an attempt to link him with American and British intelligence services. When this failed, he was accused of having ‘dangerous thoughts’ and of being ‘disrespectful to the Emperor’. Finally, he was transferred to Kiangwan prison to be court-martialled on a trumped-up charge of espionage. The penalty would be death, although it was doubtful he would live long enough to be executed: by then, he had lost half his body weight through starvation.
Despite the fact that there was a price of 100,000 pesos (£15,000) on Bill Donald’s head, he found himself among a group of people at Santo Tomas who would rather die than betray him. One of them was Carl Mydans, a photographer for Life magazine, whom he had first met in Chungking. Mydans had been caught in Manila with his wife Shelley. He had what he described as ‘furtive talks’ with Donald until September 1942 when he and his wife were shipped off to Shanghai on the first step of a prisoner exchange program.
Donald also met Jack Percival of the Sydney Morning Herald who was interned with his wife Joyce and baby son Jack Jr. ‘Years ago he worked for my father on the Bathurst Advocate,’ Percival recalled, ‘and he teased me about wheeling me around Machattie Park in a pram.’3
All of Santo Tomas’s 3500 internees faced the same problem: a chronic shortage of food. ‘For many months the internment camps were deprived of all our staple foods and we got nothing but rice and corn and now and again a little green stuff,’ Donald wrote in a letter to his daughter Muriel after the war. ‘In a land where the coconut grows more prolifically than anywhere else on earth we could not get coconuts. Nor sugar. Nor any other fruit. We were slowly being starved and many people died of malnutrition.’4
Donald lost 25 kilograms in weight ‘but was not as badly off as many’. Although there were rigid rules against trading with the enemy, the time came when Japanese soldiers roamed through Santo Tomas offering food in exchange for watches, diamonds and jewellery. ‘“Watchee, watchee,” they cried out – or “ling, ling”, or “diament”,’ Donald wrote. ‘For a $750 diamond, the Jap traders gave 2 or 3 kilos of sugar; 1 or 2 kilos of rice and some ears of corn – total value before the war of about one peso.’
In common with many of the internees, Donald built a shanty out of bits of wood and branches in the university grounds and kept out of sight of the Japanese guards as much as possible. He became a favourite with the camp’s children, telling, in the words of one mother, ‘wonderful fairy stories of “Winkie Doodle” – interspersed with bits of his own true life story in China’.5
After seven months in captivity Sybil Fernandez and her two children were sent back to Shanghai from Manila in the hold of a cargo ship with a number of other families whose menfolk were in the Shanghai Municipal Police Force. Roy Fernandez heard a ship was due in from the Philippines and went to the dockside. ‘He was very surprised to see us,’ Stephanie Fernandez says. ‘He thought we’d gone to Australia.’6 Roy moved his family into a house in the police compound in Bubbling Well Road. The Japanese were gradually taking over the running of Shanghai – in the first eight months 80 senior British police officers had been replaced with their own people. Until that process was complete, Roy would continue to work at the Central Police Station in Foochow Road with a Japanese ‘shadow’ who would take his job when he was interned.7
The Japanese also occupied the ranking posts in the council secretariat, the health department and the industrial and social division, although Eleanor Hinder says that division went on under her direction for the first eight months. She also managed to have a book entitled Life and Labour in Shanghai printed in a Japanese-run print works after first removing any mention of foreign countries.8 ‘Many enterprises have closed down and more than 80 foreign plants are operating under the supervision of Japanese authorities,’ she wrote in a letter on 10 July 1942. ‘We struggled to get satisfactory pay-off allowances for the workers dismissed and to get some travel facilities for those desiring to return to the country. Finally we got half fares third class on the trains.’
Her own salary was drastically reduced and she was forced to move out of the big flat she shared with Viola into one room. She kept a bolthole at the home of friends in Frenchtown simply to get away from the misery of downtown Shanghai. ‘It is so difficult to get about at night that one cannot get the escape of visiting friends and getting home again,’ she wrote. ‘It is a question of staying out once one goes out. There is no disguising the anguish of heart that one experiences even though one is living in comparatively good circumstances.’
The Japanese had seized all ten Allied banks and frozen the funds of Allied nationals. By queuing outside one of the banks in the freezing cold – waiting was not permitted inside the doors – those who had personal accounts were allowed to draw $2000 a month (US$50) in weekly instalments of $500.
Arch Carey, who lived with his father in Rue Ratard in Frenchtown, found it almost impossible to make ends meet. ‘By pooling their resources, four people could live together sparingly on eight thousand Chinese dollars per month,’ he wrote. ‘But it was impossible for one person or even two persons to exist on this small amount, especially those who had to pay rent. The object was to bring our standard of living down to the same level as that of the lower-class Chinese and thus make us “lose face” in the eyes of the native population.’9 For a time, fresh food and vegetables were readily available but a thriving black market soon put most of these out of reach. By the end of the war, prices in Shanghai had risen to 4000 times their prewar level.
In August 1942 Eleanor Hinder received a telegram from Viola Smith through the International Red Cross: ‘ilo [international labour organisation] offers you post earliest opportunity stop urge you accept.’ Behind the scenes, the British Residents Association had placed Eleanor’s name on a list of people to be exchanged for Japanese nationals, while the American Department of Labour co-operated with the Inter- national Labour Organisation, formerly an agency of the League of Nations, to offer her the ILO post.
On 14 August 1942 she sailed in the Kamakura Maru to Lourenco Marques in Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique) to be swapped for a Japanese pearl fisherman who was being held in Australia. ‘My own Darling Darling,’ she wrote to Viola from Lourenco Marques on 9 September. ‘For the first time in these many months I can write to you without the thought that other people would see what I have written! How long these months have been! How I have missed you, longed for you, yearned for you!’ From Africa, Eleanor made her way to London and then, despite the U-boat danger, crossed the Atlantic to Canada, where she was reunited with Viola Smith and took up her post with the ILO.
She had escaped just in time. On 21 September Japanese military headquarters announced that enemy nationals in Shanghai over the age of 13 must wear red armbands whenever they left home. The armbands had ‘B’ for British (which included Australians such as the Fernandez family), ‘A’ for Americans, ‘N’ for the Dutch and ‘X’ for others, such as South Americans. ‘I was only 11 at the time and I was jealous of my brother because he had an armband and I did not,’ Stephanie Fernandez says. ‘Far from shaming people they had the opposite effect; they became a badge of honour.’10 They were also an easy way of identifying people for internment.
That evening Carl and Shelley Mydans arrived in Shanghai in the Japanese transport Maya Maru with a group of American internees from Santo Tomas who were due to be exchanged for Ja
panese nationals in the United States. There was no blackout and Mydans was amazed to see European men dressed in immaculate white jackets and shorts standing under the bright street lights on The Bund watching the gathering on the dockside. After rollcall, a Japanese guard told the internees, ‘You may go.’
It took a few moments for the message to sink in that after eight months’ captivity in Manila they were free to move around as they pleased. Someone shouted, ‘The Palace Hotel!’ and they all bolted down The Bund clutching their little bundles of clothing. In the lobby Mydans found Chinese and European civilians mixing with Japanese officers. ‘The strange war world of Shanghai fell into perspective,’ he wrote, ‘and by the time our Chinese room boys came for our bags and we followed them across the busy lobby to the elevator we were already ourselves becoming part of it.’11
Within a week of Mydans’s arrival, however, squads of troops began rounding up Allied nationals and putting them in concentration camps, euphemistically known as ‘civil assembly centres’. Like many others involved in essential services, Henry F. Pringle, the 40-year-old bespectacled head of the Shanghai Telephone Company, had remained free until now. His luck changed on 6 October – ‘one of those beautiful Shanghai autumn days’ – when he was arrested by the Kempeitai and taken to Bridge House.
Harry Pringle had been born in China of British parents and spoke fluent Chinese. He was thrown into a lice-infested cell with 20 other European prisoners, some of them barely recognisable as human beings. The Japanese accused him of being ‘second in command’ of a Chinese cell which passed information gleaned by tapping Japanese telephones to the Soviet authorities. When Pringle refused to confess, he was tortured.
Shanghai Fury Page 41